Pentaho blends data at the source for better decision-making

Government agencies and businesses can get a more complete picture of their organizations when big data analytics is blended with operational and other data sources.

Pentaho is moving to address that need with a revamped analytics platform that integrates any data, in any environment, across a full spectrum of analytics, company officials said in a release.

A new kind of big data architecture is evolving with many moving parts including big data sources, NoSQL and traditional relational database systems, Matt Casters, Pentaho’s chief of data integration, wrote in a blog. Pentaho Business Analytics 5.0 uses SOL, which selects, filters, counts and aggregates data. It then translates the SQL data used by the various business intelligence tools into a modern interface that simplifies the user experience. “This way, Pentaho Data Integration is doing what it does best, not directed by manually designed transformations but by SQL. This is at the heart of the Pentaho Data Blending solution,” Casters explained.

Pentaho 5.0 offers administrators a new dashboard for configuring and managing security and servers while, at the same time, giving executives and managers the ability to view useful metrics from their desktops or mobile devices.

Pentaho’s 5.0 focuses on blending data as close to the source as possible for accuracy. “Data blending allows a data integration user to create a transformation capable of delivering data directly to our other Pentaho business analytics tools (and even non-Pentaho tools)," he wrote. "Traditionally data is delivered to these tools through a relational database.”

Pentaho’s Business Analytics platform already integrates with big data analytic and visualization tools such as Apache Hadoop, Cassandra, HBase and MongoDB. Pentaho now offers deeper integration with MongoDB. The platform offers new integration with Amazon Redshift and Cloudera Impala as well as new certifications with Intel, Hortonworks, MapR, and DataStax.

The company has spent the past year strengthening partnerships important for the government sector. For example, in August, Pentaho, joined with Splunk to provide a platform that will let government and business users glean more insights from machine data generated by websites, applications, servers, storage systems, networks, mobile devices and other mechanisms such as system sensors. The combined platform, the Pentaho Business Analytics and Splunk Enterprise, will let users analyze and visualize machine data to extract actionable information, company officials said.

Earlier this year, Mo’mix Solutions, a provider of integrated business intelligence applications for government and higher education, embedded Pentaho Business Analytics in its cloud-based Mo’mix Performance Center. The cloud-based, software-as-a-service offering provides greater visibility into data stored in any source such as enterprise resource planning or student information systems.